Tips for making courses reusable and easy to copy

I am looking for suggestions for things to include in a presentation I am doing next week for our faculty.

The session will be about copying courses into new course shells for next semester. In the first part of the session I will demonstrate the basic steps involved in importing course content from other courses via the 'Copy a Canvas Course' option. That part of the presentation is all pretty straight forward. I will explain the shift dates feature, specific content vs all content, using the link validator tool etc.

In the second part of the presentation I want to give them tips and tricks on how to build courses so that they don't require much re-configuring and editing when they are copied. For instance, I will recommend that they avoid including specific dates in the names of things. I would love to hear your suggestions for other things to include in this section.

Lastly, I want to help them avoid doing things that result in broken links and other issues in their destination courses. Frankly the process seems pretty easy to me but invariably I get calls from faculty who discover lots of broken links and links to unpublished items and other problems after their classes have started. The problems can often be blamed on unpublished modules and file name changes but I feel like they have found ways to break stuff that I am unaware of. If you have advice for this list, that would also be much appreciated!

Hello John. This is a good question. Mentioning specific dates as you stated is a big step. Depending on the structure of the class, the audience, and when it is normally offered how to deal with holidays can be a good point of discussion. I have worked in situations where we had to determine how to deal with a course that could be offered in a term with Thanksgiving break to work around or the first part of Spring where no longer breaks were present. This may not be much of a problem if the class is always offered during the same term.

One suggestion I make to faculty is that they consider housing content-related videos in YouTube rather than recording them directly in Canvas so that they more flexibility in where they would like that video to be included in future classes. This way if the video is on a page it copies over nicely, but if they would like that to be part of a discussion in a different class it is easy to create the new content and re-embed the YouTube link.

The reuse of courses is where having a master shell may be helpful. It can be difficult to remember to make changes to a master shell in addition to a teaching shell all the time, but most faculty I work with like to personalize a course with "current events", season-specific messages, Q and A related to items relevant to only the current class, etc. If all of this is copied from one teaching shell to another, it takes a bit of time to ensure that all of these references are changed or removed. If a master shell without this type of material is used and copied each time into a teaching shell, then a faculty member can continue personalizing that class without needing to be concerned that they didn't miss something from the last class.

Just a few thoughts. I am interested in hearing what everyone comes up with!

Here is the outline that I used for presenting the How to Copy Courses session. The details of how Question Banks behave when copied seemed kind of baffling to me until I spent some considerable amount of time testing it one afternoon. (Sorry about the strange numbering, the nested ordered lists from Word refused to copy correctly into the comment box.)

Copying Courses in Canvas

The copy process

Go to Settings and click on Import Course Content

In the drop-down at the top of the page choose ‘Copy a Canvas Course’

Search for course – your courses are listed by term

Select All Content or Select Specific Content

If you select All Content then everything in the course is selected

If you select Specific Content you will see a Select Content button after you click the Import button.

Click the Select Content button and choose the items you wish to include in your copy

When you include an item in your import all of the dependent files for that item will be included automatically. You do not have select the dependent files individually. The exception to this is Question Banks. When you select a quiz that is linked to a question bank, that question bank is not automatically selected.

Adjust Events and Due Dates

If you wish to have Canvas update your due dates to the new semester choose 'Shift Dates' If your courses have term dates then the Beginning Dates and Ending Dates will populate automatically based on those term dates. If they don't then you can put in the beginning and end dates manually.

You also have the option to Substitute days of the week. For exampleif you are copying a course that was originally taught on Mondays and Wednesdays to a course that will be taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays then you can switch all your Monday due dates to Tuesday and all your Wednesday due dates to Thursday.

There is also an option to remove all of the dates

After your Copy is Complete

Verify that your Due Dates are the way you want them to be. It is very easy to drag Assignments and Events to new locations on your Calendar page. They are also listed on the Syllabus page.

Use the "Validate Links in Content" button on the Settings page to check that your links are all working. This is a very helpful tool. It will save you a lot of headaches. When you run the Link Validator it will create a list of all of the link errors in your Many of the problem items will include links to the pages that need to be updated.

Tips for Making Courses Reusable

Avoid using dates in the names of items

Understanding the behavior of Question Banks

When you copy individual quizzes in a 'Select Content' copy, linked Question Banks are not automatically included in the copy. You have to select them manually.

If you import a single quiz that contains a question group based on a bookmarked question bank (i.e. a Question Bank from a different course) you are not given the option to select the bookmarked QB to include in the import. The question group will work and it will point to the original course that contained the question bank.

If you import a single quiz (via the 'Select Specific Content' option) that contains a question group based on a bookmarked question bank from the same course (the quiz and the QB are in the same course) you ARE given the option to select the bookmarked QB to include in the import. If you don't select that QB to include in your import then the Question Group will not work. If you do select the QB then you will get a new copy of that question bank in your destination course. It will no longer be associated with the original bookmarked Question Bank, it will be a new course-level QB.

The implication of the notes above are thatif you want to copy a course and reuse tests in that course, and you want those tests to continue to point back to the original bookmarked 'source' questions then you need to put the questions and the quizzes in different courses.

If you want to have a central repository of test questions that you can use across multiple courses and across multiple semestersthen you may want to put those question banks in a course dedicated to that function. It is also important that this course's term dates not be based on a particular semester because you will lose access to it once that term end date has passed.